Ways to Go
by shirokuri
Summary: What better summer vacation than a supposedly educational roadtrip with no destination or responsible faculty members? AKA modern road trip au featuring two college kids and their grad student chaperones. May or may not contain: complaints about absentee professors, horrible allergic reactions, being bitten by cryptids in the woods, and a six hour long board game about wizards.
1. Call Off Your Ghost

Night is falling by the time they return to the campsite, the desert sky fading to a soft gradient of warm colors and the air cooling rapidly. In the distance, the mountains are purple shadows, the faintest hint of stars twinkling above them, scattered amongst wisps of clouds.

Johnny is huddled in his sleeping bag already, his fifth cup of coffee gently steaming and clutched tightly in his hands. The cheap paperback he'd picked up at the last gas station is open face down on the dirt next to him, two galloping horses on the poorly photoshopped cover. Off to the side, Gyro whistles as he stirs something in the pot above the fire. Diego's stomach growls.

"You finally back from your makeout session in the wastelands?" Johnny asks casually, not taking his gaze off Gyro. Diego bristles, and Hot Pants rolls her eyes.

"Look, I know you have some sort of weird beef with Diego, but leave me out of this. I'm not getting paid enough," she says, shrugging off her dusty backpack and setting it on the ground. Diego follows suit and squats down to rummage through the bags. Hot Pants wanders over to the fire and sits down next to Gyro, switching to rapid Italian to converse with him.

"You think learning Italian is hard?" Johnny asks, squinting at the pair as they burst out laughing. Diego shoots him a dirty look.

"You're pathetic."

"Come on, let's learn Italian together. How hard can it be? You know, I bet it would impress Hot Pants too. That way you guys could have something to do when you go off on long walks in the desert at sunset doing – " he waves his hands vaguely at Diego, "– whatever this is."

"Fuck off. We're just looking for fossils and other old shit," Diego snarls. "You know, for our research project? There's lots of cool stuff out there. Which you'd realize if you could take your eyes off Gyro's ass for five seconds. Here, have this rodent femur." He tosses the bone in question at Johnny, who barely manages to catch it without dropping his coffee.

"That's nasty," Johnny says, wrinkling his nose and chucking the offending item back at Diego.

"You too."

Johnny heaves a dramatic sigh and picks up his book, rifling through a few of the earlier pages to remind himself where he'd left off in the completely forgettable narrative. Diego shrugs and turns his attention back to his scavenged treasures, acknowledging the stalemate for the moment.

Dinner is a simple affair. They share a couple of cans of soup, which Gyro had heated up and added some pasta into at Johnny's insistence. Depending on the person, some combination of slightly stale whole wheat bread, various jams, Nutella, and beef jerky gets put together into sandwiches. Or eaten by themselves. Peanut butter, by Diego and his allergy's request, had been left out. A handful of peanut-free granola bars and dried fruit round out the meal as dessert. Gyro passes around a plastic shopping bag to collect the trash.

Around nine, Gyro is struck like lightning by the brilliant idea of a nice ghost stories session around the fire, which gets what at best could be called a lukewarm reception, but nobody else really has anything better to do. Johnny's eyes are starting to hurt from reading in the dim light, Diego's sorted through the day's collection and thrown out most of it, and Hot Pants is seriously regretting not using up her entire printing budget from last term on a giant stack of papers for the trip.

So Gyro starts. It's honestly not a very good story, something generic about a couple of teenagers breaking into an old house at night, and his hammy storytelling style, though entertaining, detracts from whatever spookiness might've been secretly lurking in the story. Diego doesn't fare much better. In addition to lacking a proper grasp of what's supposed to be "scary," he keeps getting his story mixed up with several other, slightly different versions that have different characters, leaving everyone else – and possibly himself – confused at the end. Johnny boos him, and he throws a punch that would've hit him square in the nose if Hot Pants hadn't bear hugged him from behind.

"I'd like to see you do better," he spits. He twists around in Hot Pants' grasp, and she drops him unceremoniously. Johnny smirks and pats him patronizingly on the head.

"Just keep your ears peeled and try not to pee yourself."

"The saying is 'keep your _eyes_ peeled,' idiot."

"Whatever," Johnny huffs, crossing his arms. The corner of Hot Pants' mouth twitches, and she leans to the right to mutter something in Italian to Gyro, who snickers and whispers something back.

"We're right here, you know," Johnny says, a pout starting to form on his lips.

"Oh, no, it wasn't anything bad," Hot Pants says, the grin still faintly there. "You Americans are funny is all."

"I'm British," Diego interjects.

"Anyway," Gyro says loudly, "Johnny, didn't you say you had a good story? One that would make Diego possibly pee himself?"

"You bet." He scooches forward, the fire throwing wild shadows across his face. Narrowing his eyes conspiratorially, he starts speaking in a low voice, gaze flicking between the three of them.

"A few years ago, there was a young couple that moved into a nice, suburban neighborhood. It was a beautiful house, tastefully decorated in cheery colors, fake flowers, too many pillows on the sofa to sit comfortably, that plastic fruit crap in the bowls on the tables, you know, the whole deal.

Everything was going great; work was good, the neighbors were decent, they were thinking of having a kid or two. Then one day, the wife got sick. It wasn't too bad, just a mild flu, but she was bedridden for a few days.

Now, since she didn't want to get her husband sick too, she moved to the guest bedroom for the time being. The room had this wallpaper, and it was probably the only thing they had disagreed on when they bought the house. It was this mustard color, and she hated it so much. When she was awake, she tried everything she could to take her mind off it, but her husband had insisted she get some good rest, so she didn't have really anything to distract herself, and the wallpaper was always there. She brought it up a couple of times, but he dismissed her, saying she wouldn't be there much longer anyway.

When she got better and was gathering up her stuff to move out of the room, she saw it for the first time.

Something moved in the wallpaper.

She looked closer, but there wasn't anything there, so she thought to herself that it must've just been a trick of the light. But, in the middle of the night, she woke up to the faint sound of scratching. She followed it to the guest bedroom, and as she stepping into the room, she saw it again: the movement in the wallpaper. She tried to see if she could track it, and as the minutes ticked by, she felt a growing sense of unease until she noticed, to her horror, a vague figure in the wallpaper. It was twisted, with limbs that bent like no human limbs should be bent, and she swore when she took her eyes off it, it shifted ever so slightly.

That's how her husband found her the next day, staring at the wallpaper in the room. He asked her what was wrong, and she told him about what she'd seen. Again he dismissed her, attributing it to hysterics and residual illness.

And for a while, it seemed like everything was back to normal. They found, to their great joy, that the wife was pregnant, and they set to work converting the guest bedroom to a nursery. The wife, on her husband's insistence, took time off work to stay home and rest, but she found herself continually drawn to the guest bedroom, to the horrible yellow wallpaper.

One night, the husband woke up, and his wife wasn't in bed. He walked apprehensively through the dark house and found her in the guest bedroom, staring at the wallpaper.

'Honey,' he said slowly, 'what's wrong?' She turned toward him, and he could see her distant stare.

'They're coming,' she whispered, 'from the wallpaper. I have to watch them to stop them.'

'Come back to bed,' he pleaded. 'You're imagining things. It must be the stress. I'll change the wallpaper his weekend.'

'No!' she shouted suddenly, leaping toward him. She grabbed his arm, tighter than he expected. Her eyes widened and her voice dropped back to a hoarse whisper. 'If you take that wallpaper off you'll release them.'

'Come on, don't be silly,' he said, shaking his arm out of her grasp. But she shoved him, hard, and slammed the door shut as he stumbled backward out of the room, the lock clicking into place as he stared in disbelief.

'Open up!' he shouted, pounding on the door.

'No!' She shouted back.

It was too late at night for this shit, so the husband gave up and went back to sleep, making up his mind to deal with this mess in the morning.

Well, morning came, and the door was still locked. He rummaged around in the toolboxes in the garage and found a spare key to the guest bedroom.

'I'm coming in,' he said as he knocked on the door. There was no response. He opened the door and peered around. The room was empty, huge strips of the wallpaper peeled haphazardly from the walls and torn into pieces on the floor.

He stepped inside and the door slammed shut. He whipped his head around, trying to find his wife, when he heard a voice whose precise location he couldn't pinpoint.

'They were coming, they were coming and crawling and reaching, and I realized, they were coming for _me_ , they were coming for me and for you, to free themselves and to free us, and I had to let them out. I let them out, so why don't you join us?'

And he looked around, and there were the figures in the remains of the wallpaper, vague, indistinct, moving and crawling, fading in and out of sight, and among them, crawling and crawling, his wife."

Johnny falls silent, still leaning forward. The campsite is quiet, no noise except the crackling of the fire and the distant movements of animals in the sand. Gyro's eyes are bugged out, his mouth hanging open. Diego's scowling, armed crossed tight and lips pressed together into a thin line. Hot Pants has a thoughtful look, head tilted as if replaying the story in her mind.

"Well…?" Johnny asks expectantly, looking around at their expressions.

"Boo," Diego jeers, uncrossing his arms to flip Johnny off. "It was too long and too boring. I can't believe you made up listen to all that crap. Give me my time back." Johnny gives him the finger back instead.

"Wasn't that just an inaccurate, modernized retelling of Charlotte Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' that kinda missed the entire point of and misportrayed the allegory of the original story?" Hot Pants asks.

Johnny throws his hands up in the air. "You people are impossible to please."

"No we aren't," Diego says. "You just suck at storytelling. Stop blaming us for your shit story."

Johnny rolls his eyes and turns his back on Diego. "Hot Pants, just tell your story already and let's go to sleep," he grumbles. Diego mutters something under his breath that Johnny thinks might be "sour grapes." He ignores him. Hot Pants sighs.

"I don't really like ghost stories," she says. "Let's just go to sleep now."

"Tell a short one," Diego insists. Hot Pants makes a face but acquiesces.

"There was a couple in the neighborhood I used to live in," she starts. "I didn't know them too well even though we went to high school together. We just didn't have much in common, from what I can tell. So this is all stuff I heard from other people, who heard it from others, and I don't remember all the details very well.

Anyway, they went out on a date together one weekend, and as a surprise, uh, let's just call him Billy to protect his identity, drove the two of them a little way out of town, to a reasonably secluded area. They were, I don't know, doing whatever high school couples do in reasonably secluded areas – " here Johnny snickers and waggles his eyebrows at Diego, " – when Billy realized he'd left the headlights on. Of course, he realized this when the car battery died and the headlights went out.

'Oh crap,' Billy said, squinting out into the darkness. 'Can you call your brother and have him drive out with some jumper cables?'

'Can't,' uh, Jenny, I guess we can call her, said. 'We're too far out to get cell service.'

Billy sighed and opened the car door. 'Stay here,' he said. 'I'll walk a bit back toward town and see if I can get service. There's a couple of flares in the trunk; I'll take one, and if anything goes wrong, I can use it to let you know. Same with you. Keep the door locked in case there's anything weird out there.'

So, Jenny was waiting in the car with the doors locked for about twenty minutes or so when she saw a flare go off in the distance on the road back to town. She panicked and tried to make herself as invisible as possible in the car, crouching down into the foot space on the passenger's side and throwing her jacket over herself.

The minutes went by, and despite the adrenaline, she started getting sleepy because it was pretty late. Like it is now. She managed to drift in and out of sleep even in that uncomfortable, cramped space.

Suddenly, there was a noise outside the car. She pulled out her pocketknife, heart pounding, but she didn't say anything. Something scratched at the door handle for a few minutes before everything went quiet again."

Hot Pants goes quiet.

"And…?" Gyro prompts after a few seconds.

"I forgot. Something about a man and the car door with a hand hook on the door. I told you, I don't like ghost stories. Fear isn't a compelling emotion to appeal to."

"Oh my God," Diego groans, burying his face in his hands. "I can't believe exactly zero of us can tell a proper ghost story."

"Fuck you," Johnny shoots back. "My story was pretty good."

As the two of them fall into yet another petty squabble, Gyro looks at Hot Pants with wide eyes.

« So, what really happened at the end? » he asks. « Was it so scary you couldn't tell us because Diego would pee himself? You can tell me. I promise I won't tell him. » Hot Pants looks back at him incredulously.

« It's a story. Nothing happened. »

« But you said they lived in your neighborhood and went to high school with you. Did they go missing? Were they murdered? » At the last word, he lowers his voice and glances around at the desert with suspicion. « Do we need to keep watch tonight for men with hand hooks at our car doors? »

« Gyro, » Hot Pants says in a strained voice, « it's an American urban legend. It's a made up story to discourage teenagers from wandering off by themselves to have sex out in the woods. None of it was real. You can look it up online if you're really that desperate to find out what happens, but it's not really a great story. I got bored of it halfway through and I'm tired, so let's just all call it a night. »

« But you said they went to your high school! »

« It was just a narrative device to make it seem more realistic and "scary." Anyway, I'm going to sleep now, and I'm waking up at six tomorrow, so good night, » she says firmly. She walks over to the car, opens the trunk, and tosses the three sleeping bags still in it onto the ground. By this point Johnny and Diego have sulked off to opposite sides of the fire, so she hauls all the sleeping bags next to it.

"Okay kiddos, it's bedtime for me. I can sleep through pretty much anything, but you should keep your voices down anyway. You never know what's lurking out there in the darkness of the night." She wiggles her fingers for emphasis before unrolling a sleeping bag and zipping herself up in it, turning her back to the light.

The fire crackles in the space between the remaining three of them, tempers cooling in the silence. Insects chirp and buzz, the stubby trees and squat bushes standing as shadowing sentries around them all. The rock formation the campsite is nestled in blocks most of their view of the distant surroundings save a large gap in the wall in the form of a natural arch. Not that much could be seen in the darkness anyway.

"Let's just take it easy then," Gyro says. "I'm driving tomorrow morning, so I should sleep soon anyway." He sets up his sleeping bag across the fire from Hot Pants', which is now gently moving up and down as she breathes. Settling down, he pulls over his backpack and removes a small rectangular case with a flourish.

"How about some music to send the day off?" He opens the case to reveal a slightly beat up but lovingly polished harmonica. Diego raises an eyebrow as he and Johnny drag their sleeping bags to either side of his.

"Harmonica?"

Gyro shrugs. "It's portable," he says. Then he reaches into his pack again and pulls out a battered teddy bear. Its fur is patchy in several places, one of its arms is sewn on with bright red thread, and the eye on the other side of its head is missing. Its sole piece of clothing is a simple purple cape with "Go Go Zeppeli" embroidered clumsily on it.

"Say 'hi' to Johnny and Diego," Gyro says to the bear. He picks up one of its paws and moves it, simulating a wave from the bear to the bemused pair.

"Hi Johnny and Diego," he says in a comically gruff voice. "I'm Mr. Bear. Nice to meet you!" Johnny gives him a giant, goofy grin that Diego files away as material to poke fun at him for later.

"Hi Mr. Bear."

"You named your bear toy 'Mr. Bear,'" Diego comments flatly.

"What about it?" Johnny and Gyro ask simultaneously, the former with a glare and the latter innocently.

"Nothing," Diego answers with his hands held defensively in front of himself. "It's definitely a creative name, for sure."

"And I'll have you know," Gyro continues, "Mr. Bear is more than a 'toy,' as you called him. He's a true companion, a guide on the unknown road of the future, the love of my life." He hugs Mr. Bear tightly. Diego shoots Johnny an unimpressed look while Gyro is distracted.

 _You really like this guy?_ he mouths. Johnny shrugs, though his cheeks redden.

Gyro arranges Mr. Bear next to him in a sitting position before taking a deep breath and starting to play the harmonica. It's a melancholy melody, soft and with just the right amount of plaintively drawn-out notes. Diego wriggles into his sleeping bag, folds his hands under his head, and takes in the night sky above him. This far out from the city, the stars are as abundant as students at the first day of lectures. Hanging among them, the moon looks like a fat crescent wedge of cheese, the bright band of the Milky Way in the backdrop.

Diego glances over. Johnny has his knees drawn up to his chest, staring mesmerized at Gyro, who has his eyes closed in concentration. He doesn't remember the last time he saw Johnny like this, vulnerable, enraptured, and carefree. It's nice. Maybe, he thinks, this is the Johnny he could really be friends with, friends that don't argue over every trivial thing, whose competitions never spiral out of hand so quickly.

A small bright light streaks across the corner of the sky. A few seconds later, another. And a third.

He closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep to the gentle strains of the harmonica.

Johnny's mostly asleep, the smell of smoke clearing from his nostrils as the wind shifts and the embers aren't being blown right in his direction anymore, when he feels something nudging his side. He rolls around sloppily, groaning in complaint at being forced to move. His back is already starting to ache from lying on the hard dirt, and he prays they'll be staying in a hotel tomorrow.

"Johnny, hey Johnny," Gyro whispers urgently.

"Toilet paper's in the front pocket of my backpack," he mumbles, turning back away.

"No, I don't need to pee," Gyro says. He pauses. "Unless maybe from fear? Hot Pants' story was really good. Too good. I can't sleep now. What if there's a man with a hand hook out there?"

"Gyro – " Johnny starts to say, but Gyro continues talking.

"And your story! It was so scary! What if my apartment next year has yellow wallpaper? They don't let you change the wallpaper in the school-subsidized housing! I'll have to cover everything up with posters!"

"Gyro," Johnny says again, the small smile on his face unnoticed in the darkness. "All those were just stories we made up to have fun. There's nothing to worry about. And if there's really anything out there, we've all got your back, ok? Go to sleep."

Gyro doesn't say anything for a long while. Johnny thinks Gyro's maybe fallen asleep and the subject is over, but as he fades out of the waking world again he thinks he hears a quiet reply.

"Thanks, Johnny."

* * *

A/N: Crossposted from AO3. Man, I forgot that FF doesn't have notes and I have to do this...

Work title "Ways to Go" by Grouplove.

Chapter title "Call Off Your Ghost" by Dessa.

Apparently « » are actually the traditional Italian quotation marks, which is a great coincidence because I wanted to use them to denote when people were speaking Italian anyway.

This was completely self-indulgent in every way possible, I'm literally writing it when morning lectures are too boring and start putting me to asleep, so I apologize for absolutely nothing except horribly butchering "The Yellow Wallpaper."


	2. Dirty Paws

When Diego wakes up the next morning, he's greeted by Hot Pants tossing him a bottle of water and a granola bar. He catches the water, barely, but the granola bar hits him on the cheek.

"Morning," Hot Pants says. "You missed the sunrise. It was beautiful." The sky is indeed already a soft, baby blue, the sun hanging above the mountains. Diego's grateful for the shade of the rocks around them; the air is warming up, and he struggles off the turtleneck sweater he'd worn to sleep.

"Morning," he replies, blinking blearily. "What time is it?"

"Eight," she says. "I hiked out a bit this morning in the opposite direction of where we went yesterday. I found these." She reaches into the left pocket of her shorts and drops a handful of bullet casing on the ground. Diego squints at them.

"Should we be afraid?" he asks.

"I think people sometimes just go out into the desert to shoot guns," Hot Pants says, shrugging. "I don't think it's legal, but I guess it happens anyway."

Diego hums and picks up one of them. It's longer than his index finger.

"What exactly are they shooting out there with these?"

"I don't know, dinosaurs?"

Diego rolls his eyes, stretches, and yawns.

"When are we heading out?" he asks, ripping open the granola bar wrapper and taking a bite of breakfast. He has a feeling granola bars are going to get really old really quickly, so he enjoys the flavor while he still can.

"Nine or so? We've got about 400 kilometers to the next site I want to visit, but I figure we'll be stopping at places along the way too. I'm not too sure what Gyro and Johnny are planning."

"Do you think they're going to wake up on time?" Diego asks, gesturing at them. Their sleeping bags are pushed close to each other and both are snoring, Gyro much less gently so than Johnny. Diego picks up a small rock and tosses it into the air a few times to get a feel for its weight, eyeing the lump he identifies as Johnny. A single disapproving look from Hot Pants is enough to make him drop it sheepishly.

"Need help with anything?" he asks, removing himself from the too-warm confines of the sleeping bag and shoving the empty wrapper into his pocket. He opens the water bottle and takes several large gulps, suddenly keenly aware of how dry his mouth is.

"Just get your stuff packed up and put away," she replies, throwing the car keys to him. He follows her instructions, rolling up the sleeping bag and dusting it off as best as he as can before shoving it into the trunk. The turtleneck he tosses onto the passenger's seat, intending to claim the spot when they leave.

They sit next to each other for the following half hour or so cataloging their findings from the day before and from Hot Pants' morning hike. Diego carefully measures everything, describing each object's characteristics while Hot Pants records the information in her lab notebook in meticulous handwriting. They bag up the few samples they want to take back that are legal to bring across state borders and snap a couple of photos of the rest with the cheap camera the university had loaned them. Diego hesitates, then takes a pictures of Johnny and Gyro sleeping with his cell phone as well.

"Blackmail," he explains when Hot Pants gives him a quizzical look.

"How long have you known each other?" she asks, carefully sliding her notebook back into her backpack.

"Uh, a couple of years," Diego replies, taken aback by her sudden interest in his private life. He wouldn't say she's been distant, especially after she'd agreed to be his mentor for this summer project, but in the year they'd known each other she'd never asked him much beyond his research interests. "He transferred to my high school halfway through sophomore year. I think he got kicked out of his old school."

"Was this in America or Britain? I thought he was American."

"America. I got adopted a while before that by an American family. They're actually related to Johnny, but the family tree's hard to follow and I don't know exactly what we're supposed to be. Probably some sort of cousins."

Hot Pants nods thoughtfully. "Gyro and I met at the international students' orientation. We liked the same beer and got a little too drunk. He's a good guy. I'm glad he agreed to mentor Johnny." She nudges him and smiles. "We're going to have a fun summer." Diego smiles back, hoping that if he's blushing at all Hot Pants will just attribute it to the heat of the desert.

Her phone starts buzzing and dinging at that point, breaking them out of the moment.

"And now it's time for everyone to wake up," she declares, standing and retrieving the pot and soup ladle from the night before. Gyro had wiped everything down with some napkins, but both are still coated with an oily sheen and in need of an actual wash. Hot Pants bangs the ladle against the side of the pot as she walks over to the two sleepers.

"Wake up guys, it's time to hit the road," she shouts. She repeats herself a few times, circling the two of them like a loud bird of prey. Johnny wiggles further into his sleeping bag while Gyro bolts upright like a startled rabbit, Mr. Bear falling onto the ground as he does so.

"Ugh, what time is it?" Gyro asks, looking around for Mr. Bear. He finds the teddy bear and dusts it off stowing it safely away once it's as clean as it'll be.

"8:40. We should head out soon." She stops next to Johnny, bends down, and unzips the entire sleeping bag in one fell swoop, throwing it open to the outside world. Johnny screeches at the sudden light and curls up into a small ball.

"Rise and shine kiddo. Get packed up; we're heading out in twenty minutes."

Johnny finally sits up reluctantly, his hair a mess.

"Coffee?" he mumbles, shrugging off his jacket.

"I didn't make any," Hot Pants replies. "You're free to make some if you can finish on time. There's a bit of water still left in the jug we opened yesterday, and the instant coffee is somewhere in the car. The fire's completely put out, though. Will cold coffee do?"

Johnny takes some time to process the information being thrown at him then seems to reach the inevitable conclusion that coffee will be too hard to make without coffee already in his system. Gyro looks equally put out.

« Can we stop somewhere before I take my turn driving? » he asks. Hot Pants' expression has exactly zero percent surprise in it.

« We can, » she says, « but you should just stick to later shifts next time. » Gyro nods, thoroughly embarrassed.

« Thanks. I owe you one. »

They head out around 9:15, Hot Pants carefully maneuvering the car through the archway. The radio isn't able to pick up anything this far into the desert, so Diego, who successfully defended his claim to shotgun, hooks his phone up to the audio system. Johnny, of course, complains about his taste in music, to which Diego responds by, of course, turning it up louder. Gyro somehow manages to sleep through all this, his face smushed against the window and a stray lock of hair fluttering back and forth in front of his mouth.

A while after they reach the paved road, they finally get to the outskirts of the nearest town.

"I don't know what they have around here, but do you have any preferences?" Hot Pants asks, slowing down. They pass by a Del Taco.

"How about a local shop?" Johnny suggests nudging Gyro awake. Hot Pants nods and parks at the first mom and pop diner she sees. It's a nice, cozy establishment, aggressively decorated to maximize hominess. The selection it offers is small, but the air in the building smells absolutely heavenly to Gyro and Johnny, who immediately rush up to the counter and scan the menu for their favorite kinds of bean juice.

Hot Pants gets them a table in the corner and is joined shortly after by Diego, who ordered himself a plate of bacon despite having already eaten. Gyro and Johnny linger by the counter waiting for the orders and chatting with the owners of the establishment. Or, at least Gyro chats with them. Johnny mostly hovers behind him with a frown.

After they retrieve the orders and bring everything to the table, they get to work hashing out the plans for the day. The site Hot Pants wants to visit is buried deep in the middle of the state and there are a couple of small detours Gyro wants to make along the way, so they try and find the most efficient route to hit them all. Gyro has to give up a spot to make sure they reach their final destination with enough daytime left to do anything.

They load themselves into the car in the same configuration as before, Gyro having conceded to his lack of morning personness and promising to drive the afternoon shift instead. Hot Pants finds a classic rock channel and sings along with Diego. Neither of them is particularly good, but that doesn't deter their enthusiasm or volume.

"Is everything ok?" Gyro asks Johnny, who hasn't heckled Diego even once about the singing. "You seem quieter than usual."

Johnny shrugs. "I'm kinda tired. I didn't sleep too great yesterday, and my back hurts. I really hope we stay at an actual hotel tonight." He pauses for a second then snorts. "Also, that lady at the diner was trying _so_ hard not to stare at me. I could see her looking at my crutches out of the corner of her eye the entire time you were talking to her."

"Oh," Gyro says, brows furrowed. "I hadn't noticed. Sorry, that must suck."

"I guess people in my class got used to me after two years in college together, so I almost forgot people stare and act weird around me. At least she didn't try to tell me what an inspiration I am for being alive." He puts on a gruff voice. "Wow, I can't believe someone like you can shop for groceries by yourself. I'm so inspired by your wheelchair and family-sized bag of potato chips." He switches back to his normal voice. "That's literally a thing that happened once."

Gyro laughs dryly. "I can imagine that would become annoying very quickly. What did you say to that person?"

"I told him I couldn't believe he could go shopping by himself with no hair and that I'd remember him fondly as a source of inspiration when I go bald in my eighties. He backpedaled so quickly. I can still see the absolutely horrified expression on his face." He does an impression, eyes and mouth open wide in shock, the faint hint of a vein popping out on his forehead.

They share a chuckle, then "Bohemian Rhapsody" comes on and Johnny joins Diego and Hot Pants in belting out slightly off-tune notes. Hot Pants takes the lead during the second half and the two guys provide the chorus, their falsettos not quite hitting the highest notes.

"Do you not know this song, or are you embarrassed by your singing or something?" Johnny asks Gyro when they finish and Diego and Hot Pants start on the next song. Gyro reddens a little.

"I don't listen to many older English songs," he confesses.

"Oh, I didn't mean it like a bad thing. What do you listen to then?"

"Mostly I use those websites that play things based on what you tell them you like. I don't really know what genre the music is. You should recommend me some songs. You guys look like you're having a fun time; it'd be nice to join in next time."

"I actually don't usually listen to classic rock, but everyone knows 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' Here's another popular one," he says, holding his phone and earbuds out to Gyro. Gyro accepts them, then offers one of the earbuds back to him.

For the next hour of the drive, Johnny takes Gyro on an overview of his top must-know songs, Gyro following along with the lyrics on his own phone. Diego and Hot Pants continue singing to the radio, giggling at how bad they collectively sound.

Hot Pants finally pulls off the highway just as Johnny thinks his bladder is reaching its upper limit. There doesn't seem to be anything special about this exit. The surrounding landscape is all flat, golden-brown dirt and dust, crops and fruit trees spanning the distance in orderly rows. The buildings immediately off the exit are the usual suspects – fast food chains, three gas stations, and a serviceable motel.

"What exactly is supposed to be here?" Diego asks, peering out the window. The street names are unassuming: Main Street, First Avenue, Bear Claw Mountain Drive.

"There's a small zoo I found," Gyro says. He elaborates when Diego shoots him a confused look. "It mostly only houses native species, but they have a good model of captive animal care. I thought it would be a good place to start with Johnny's project."

"Wait, is your project just to go visit zoos and look at animals?" Diego asks, twisting around to look at Johnny. Johnny scowls.

"Is yours just to hike around and pick up trash?"

"Fine, don't tell me." Diego turns back around and crosses his arms.

"Johnny's studying behavioral changes in animals that have suffered traumatic injuries," Gyro interjects, catching Hot Pants' eye in the rearview mirror with a slightly pained expression. _We need to talk about this later_ , it says. "What about you?"

Diego scrunches his eyebrows together, sulking, but replies. "I'm not picking up trash. I'm looking for cool things around hiking trails and mapping the distribution of stuff. Like fossils."

"That's very cool!" Gyro says too enthusiastically after a few seconds of sullen silence from Johnny and Diego both. His tone of voice pleads for backup form Hot Pants, who does her best to oblige.

"We're uh, we're about five minutes away from the zoo, so if you want to bring anything along you should get your stuff together," she says. Everyone eagerly seizes the opportunity to do anything else but stew in the dregs of the latest spat.

The main entrance to the zoo is about as impressive as Johnny expected, which is to say not very but decent for its size. The decorations are mostly cheesy cartoon representations of various critters, some with speech bubbles containing welcome messages or friendly reminders of bad zoo manners not to have, thank you very much.

Gyro goes up to the ticket window, and Johnny, having finally had a chance to pee, takes the opportunity to observe the surroundings as Diego and Hot Pants starting discussing their project. There are a few other tourists around, and as he looks closer he notices they seem to be either families with small children or people around their age with older, responsible-looking chaperones with them.

"What do you make of them?" Johnny asks Gyro after he returns and motions for them to follow. He gestures toward the latter groups.

"Oh. They're probably research groups. There's a lab nearby. Well, not nearby, but reasonably close. This place gets a decent amount of federal funding and has partnerships with a couple of universities in the state. That's part of why I picked here to visit."

When they get to the gate, there's a woman waiting for them who introduces herself as one of the zookeepers.

"I'll be your guide today," she says. "Feel free to ask me any questions about our facilities or about the animals themselves. I work with the small mammals, but I can answer general questions about other animals or direct you to the relevant staff."

They follow her in, and she takes them through the public areas first, pointing out various features of the enclosures and explaining the tweaks the zoo has made over the years as understanding of animal needs has increased. Johnny asks questions at almost every exhibit, scribbling furiously in his notebook. A few of their fellow visitors trail after them at various points, listening in on the discussion until they get bored and wander off again. Diego lingers in the reptiles' section, face all but pressed up against the glass in excitement, and Hot Pants has to drag him away so they can keep up with the rest of the group.

When they're done with the first part of the tour, their guide takes them behind the scenes of the zoo's operations. Johnny's eyes somehow light up more than they already have; Diego, on the other hand, zones out almost immediately and briefly considers asking if he can go back outside. But, he decides not to do anything to break the spell this place has over Johnny They'll each get their own times on this trip, and he'll respect that right now it's a Johnny moment. They don't get to actually handle any of the animals – as expected – but they do get to see them up close.

"In terms of injured animals, we usually only take in threatened to endangered species," the guide says. "Our goal is rehabilitation, with the aim of eventually releasing them back into the wild, but many times this is not possible. I pointed out a few of the recovered animals earlier; if I understand correctly, you're interested in studying them, right?"

Johnny nods, and they once again launch into a conversation that Diego has exactly no interest in. Gyro chimes in occasionally but otherwise lets Johnny guide the discussion as he sees fit.

They finally wrap up around two in the afternoon, when everyone is starving. By this point, no one is really picky about food, and they stop at the first food chain they see. Johnny flips through his notes as they wait for their order to arrive and asks Gyro some clarifying questions, jotting his answers down in the margins. The pages are a mess and nigh impossible to decipher, but apparently he can still read his own handwriting.

"So you want to be a vet?" Hot Pants asks over her half-eaten sandwich. It's the only one out of the four they got that has any sort of vegetable in it. Johnny swallows his mouthful of coffee and sets the cup down.

"Yeah. My family owned a couple of horses when I was a kid, and I really loved them. Taking care of animals would be my dream job. Honestly, they're better than probably ninety percent of people anyway."

"That's an interesting thought," Hot Pants says politely as Diego rolls his eyes from next to her and mouths, _edgelord_. Johnny pretends not to see and turns his attention back to his lunch.

The rest of the day is less eventful, partially because everyone – with the exception of Hot Pants, who seems to have a limitless store of calm energy – is already exhausted. Gyro's other few stops consist of a variety of pet shops, animal shelters, and veterinary clinics around the area. He finds some sort of lesson in each one, explaining what they're doing right and wrong in terms of their facilities, earning not a few dirty looks from the owners of the establishments.

Hot Pants' final destination is another hiking site, to everyone else no different from most of the surrounding landscape. Gyro and Johnny opt out and instead drive ahead to the nearest town to find a motel within their travel budget that doesn't look _too_ shady. They finally settle on one that still has "colored TV" as a key advertising point. The two of them return to the trailhead to pick up Hot Pants and Diego, who are both dusty and sweaty but beaming triumphantly.

"Look what we found," Diego says excitedly, pulling something out of his pocket. He bounds up to Johnny and shoves it in his face.

"That's a cool… rock?" Johnny says, taking a small step back from Diego's spirited movements.

"No, no. Look at this," Diego says, pointing to a corner of the rock. Johnny squints. There's something vaguely spiral shaped.

"Is it a snail?"

"Some sort of mollusk fossil, yeah," Diego says, putting the rock back into his pocket. "This whole state used to be underwater millions of years ago. We found a couple of shells too, but no fish, unfortunately."

"Yay, mollusks," Johnny says with surprisingly little sarcasm, though also with little enthusiasm. "High five, Diego." They high five, Diego putting too much force into it and almost knocking Johnny over.

The motel rooms are decent. There's two twin beds per room, clean though worn-down bathrooms, and, true to advertisement, colored TVs. They have dinner at the first place that shows up on Google maps when Johnny searches "restaurants," which turns out not to be a bad strategy.

"Breakfast starts at 7:30," Hot Pants announces when they return to the motel. "Since it's Saturday tomorrow, let's aim to be awake and ready to go at ten. There's a couple of theme parks and museums within reasonable driving distance for a day trip, so why don't you two pick somewhere to go?" She directs the last sentence to Johnny and Diego with only the barest hint of apprehension creeping into her voice. They nod.

"Alright, you two are in room 103," Gyro says, handing the key over to Diego and Johnny. It's an actual key, not a keycard, 103 written on the keychain attached to it. "We'll be in 107. Johnny, let's meet in your room to go over what we did today. Diego, you can meet with Hot Pants in 107."

They parts ways for the time being and finish up with work for the day. It's late by the time they're done, but when they reconvene Gyro declares that he and Hot Pants are heading out to the bar and that the two undergrads shouldn't hesitate to call or text if they need anything.

"Should we ask to tag along and use our fakes?" Johnny whispers to Diego as the grad students get ready to leave. Diego makes a face.

"It's too early for that. What if they don't approve?"

Johnny sighs. "I guess you're right. I'm pretty tired anyway."

They return to their room, and Johnny lets Diego shower first to wash off the grime from his hike. When Johnny finishes with his shower, Diego is sprawled out on the bed closer to the door and window, idly flipping through the channels on the old TV. Johnny rests his crutches against the wall and flops down onto the other bed. It's not exactly the most comfortable bed he's ever slept on, comparable to the cheap dorm mattresses, but it's several orders of magnitudes better than yesterday. Diego tosses him the remote, but he doesn't see anything good so he leaves it on a random channel.

"Want to go to the natural history museum tomorrow?" Diego asks as the auctioneer on screen talks way too fast for either of them to follow what's going on.

"What about the wax museum instead?"

"Hell no. Those things are so creepy."

"It won't take the whole day to go to either," Johnny says, tapping on his phone. "Let's go to both places. Look, they're pretty close to each other." He turns the phone to Diego. "We can definitely do both."

"Fine," Diego huffs. "But we're going to the stupid wax museum first then. I don't want to be thinking about those creepy stares when I try to sleep tomorrow night."

"Deal."

They let the TV drone on for a few more minutes as they catch up on emails and chats, then Diego sets his phone down, bundles himself up in his blankets, and rolls around so his back is facing Johnny and the lamp in the far corner.

"Good night, Johnny. Try not to snore too much," comes Diego's muffled voice.

"Yeah, whatever, just hurry up and pass out already so I can finally get some peace and quiet," Johnny replies, not looking up from his phone.

"You know, 'good night' would've been perfectly fine."

"Good night," Johnny says firmly, turning the TV off and stuffing his earbuds into his ears. He pauses, then shuffles shakily over to the lamp and turns it off too.

By midnight, both are sound asleep and softly snoring.

« What're we supposed to do about the two of them? » Gyro asks as Hot Pants takes another drink of her beer. There's some sort of sports game being shown on the TVs in the bar, a good portion of the patrons erupting into cheers or boos every once in a while. They're tucked away in a booth in the corner; the lighting is worse, but at least it's just a little bit quieter.

« I don't know, » Hot Pants sighs. « They're both great students and great guys, but I'm worried they'll get sidetracked by whatever problems they have with each other. I mean, they definitely _can_ get along; we've both seen it happen. But, they keep acting like little kids all the time. » She sets her glass down. « Truth be told, I'm not sure how much longer I can handle mediating their conflict. Definitely not the whole summer at least. Maybe we should come up with a backup plan in case we need to separate them. »

Gyro hums in agreement. « Do you know what happened between them? »

Hot Pants shakes her head. « I tried asking Diego about how they met, but I didn't want to pry too much. They're related somehow, so maybe it's a family issue? »

« It seems like such a pity to split up though, » Gyro mulls. « I really thought they would get along well. Johnny even specifically asked me to see if he could go with Diego for his project, and I had to go talk to the dean to make it happen. I hate that guy. »

« Wait a minute, _Diego_ asked _me_ to arrange for him to go with Johnny. I had to talk to that asshole too. » She taps her fingers on the table in thought, then downs the rest of her drink and stands up to get another round for the two of them.

« Well, I guess we can just see how things go then. »

* * *

A/N: Chapter title "Dirty Paws" by Of Monsters and Men.

The first part of the chapter and most of the last chapter were sort of inspired by my house's annual camping trip to Joshua Tree National Park. I drove one year and it was terrible because I got about 4 hours of sleep and then everyone in my car fell asleep and I was like "please I need a navigator." One of the last places to eat before you get into the park is a Del Taco, but my friend really hates Del Taco, so we'd joke about stopping there to get dinner.

I'm able-bodied and did some research and read blog posts by people with disabilities to try my best to write about Johnny's disability as respectfully as I could, but please let me know if I wrote anything ableist.


	3. Another Town

"Why are they all _staring_ at me?" Diego spits through gritting teeth, slouched over as if it would somehow hide him from the lifeless waxy gazes surrounding him. "I hate this place so much."

"Come on, lighten up and take a picture of me with the president," Johnny says, handing over his phone and striking a dramatic pose. Diego grumbles but snaps a quick photo.

"You look like an idiot," he says as he gives the phone back. Johnny inspects the picture.

"Speak for yourself. This pose is fabulous."

The two grad students trail after them. As the museum is populated almost entirely by American figures, or at least wax depictions of them, Gyro has to look up information about the less famous people and shares it with Hot Pants.

« Wait, I recognize her, » Hot Pants says, stopping in front of a dark haired woman in colonial-era clothing. She has a sharp but still warm look in her eyes that commands their attention. « She's the woman from that history documentary we saw a month ago. Abigail Adams, I think. »

« Oh, I remember that one. It was a good documentary. »

The wax museum is dimly lit, its visitor pool mostly teenagers dicking around with their friends and taking silly photos with the wax figures, some blatantly ignoring the "Do Not Touch" signs. Johnny and Diego fit right in, the latter maybe a little less so as he slinks through the museum, trying to avoid eye contact with anything humanoid. The rooms are vaguely divided by time period, stretching from around the Revolutionary War period to the present. Most of the statues are in exaggerated poses, some on the edge of what's physically possible for humans, giving them a slightly uncanny air made worse by how otherwise realistic they look.

"Hey Gyro," comes a whisper from behind him. He jumps.

"Johnny! Don't scare me like that," he says, hand pressed on his chest.

"Sorry," Johnny says, laughing a little. "I thought you might enjoy this though; I heard a story a few years ago about some cursed wax figures."

"Cursed?" Gyro asks, backing away from the figure he'd been studying. Hot Pants rolls her eyes and wanders away from them and toward Diego, who'd been looking like he wanted to bolt out of the nearest exit for the last half an hour.

"Yeah," Johnny says. "There was this guy who wanted to open up a tourist trap in Oregon, so he found these discount wax figures at a garage sale. They were super cheap, which, you know, should've been a red flag. But, the guy just thought he was a savvy businessman who tricked a gullible idiot into giving him a great deal. Well, turns out they were cursed and would come to life when the moon was waxing."

Johnny grins, savoring his pun. Gyro, despite his horror, finds himself captivated by the story already, unable to tear himself away and escape from what he knows will keep him up at night.

"It wasn't so bad at first," Johnny continues. "They'd just roam around, have some harmless fun while the guy was asleep, maybe minor property damage at most. But, the wax museum was kind of a flop, so the guy moved onto his next tourist trap scheme."

"What's a 'flop'?" Gyro interjects.

"It means it was a failure, which is why he moved all the wax figures to the basement, locked up the door, and forgot about them for years – no, decades. Just imagine what it was like for them, trapped in a dark room, sentient half the time and unable to leave. They slowly became angrier and angrier, their resentment turning into lust for vengeance, and they plotted to make him pay.

One day, an employee stumbled upon the basement door. When he brought it up, the guy finally remembered the wax figures and thought he might get that up and running again, since nothing else had really worked in the meantime. He left the door unlocked, intending on moving everything up the next day. But, now that the door had been opened, the wax figures were free to roam again, to carry out the plan they had put so many years' thought into.

And that very night," Johnny says, voice barely a whisper, forcing Gyro to lean in closer, "they took an axe… and chopped off his head."

Gyro stares at him. "Oh my god," he says slowly, revelation dawning in his eyes. "We're going to get our heads chopped off. Johnny, this was a terrible place to come to. Why didn't you warn us sooner? We have to get out of here before it's too late."

"Oh, don't worry," Johnny says breezily. " _These_ are normal wax figures, not cursed ones. We'll be fine." Gyro doesn't look very certain or reassured, but he lets the subject go, keeping a wider berth around the wax figures for the rest of the time there lest he somehow incur their wrath.

The natural history museum is a few towns away. It's certainly not the most impressive museum Diego has been to, but it's a welcome change from the horrors of the wax museum and Johnny's sense of humor. The initial exhibits outline the formation of the universe and Earth itself. None of the four really has a strong background or interest in astronomy or astrophysics, so they don't spend too long there, just enough time to read through all the plaques – in Hot Pants' case – or glance at all the dioramas and watch the video of Earth's formation three times.

The emergence of life comes next, with a brief prologue of the environmental changes that gave rise to the opportunity as well as a few theories of where the origins of life lay. The museum has in a display case a small rock that apparently contains evidence of ancient microbes, but the accompanying magnifying glass is nowhere near strong enough to see anything, so they just trust that the 100x magnification inset is accurate and that the science wasn't a mistake.

"Man," Johnny says, reading the caption accompanying one of the diagrams, "we really haven't been here for very long, have we? It's just single-celled stuff for billions of years. Humans are just a tiny blip in the clock compared to them."

Diego shrugs. "What was it you said yesterday? 'Animals are better than people anyway'?"

"Microbes aren't animals, dumbass."

The next section is the entire reason Diego had even wanted to go in the first place: dinosaurs. They're grouped with the rest of the pre-human exhibits, which limits how much space can be dedicated to any one topic, but it doesn't bother him much. There are a couple of models: fish with terrible teeth that might or might not still exist in the unexplored depths of the ocean; some sort of early terrestrial vertebrate that looks like a giant, squished tadpole with legs; and a raptor, cut in half from head to tail to show how the fossilized bones nestle inside, theorized muscle structure and organs included. It's cool but kinda grizzly, Diego thinks, and possibly not the most family-friendly display.

But, what catches and holds his attention is, of course, the dinosaur skeletons looming over them. He's been to dozens of museums, looked at probably hundreds of fossil specimen, but every time he sees a new one he feels that same rush of awe his five-year-old self had felt when his mother had taken him to a museum for the first time. This one has two near-complete skeletons standing amidst some fake plants, much larger than their modern-day descendants. A few skulls and assorted bones are displayed in glass cases around the perimeter. And above it all, a pterosaur hangs from the ceiling, wings outstretched and beak open.

"Hey, is that a _T. Rex_?" Johnny asks, pointing at one of the two skeletons in the plants.

"It's actually a _Therizinosaurus_ , which means something like 'scythe lizard.' Look at those huge claws on its hands; that's how it got its name. These things could weigh around five tonnes. They were probably herbivores though. Pretty cool, isn't it?"

"I see," Johnny says, nodding sagely. "That's pretty neat. So, is _that_ one a _T. rex_ then?"

Diego gives him a funny look. "That looks like a nodosaurid. They're related to the ankylosaurids and share similar heavy body armor, but they don't have mace-like tails. It's not even bipedal; why would you think that's a _T. rex_?"

"Wow, Diego, you really know your dinosaurs, don't you?" Johnny says, impressed. "I guess I'm just not as good at this as you are, so _T. rex_ is really the only thing I know. I still have one last question though: is _that_ a _T. rex_?" He points at the remaining skeleton, the one suspended from the ceiling.

"Ha ha," Diego says sarcastically, rolling his eyes. But he answers the question anyway. "That's some sort of ornithocheirid. They're pterosaurs with distinct, round crests protruding from both the upper and lower jaws. The lower one's a little hard to see, but the upper one really stands out."

"You're such a fucking nerd," Johnny teases, punching him on the shoulder. "I can't believe you made us come here so you could show off your weird dino trivia."

"You asked me about it," Diego huffs, storming away from Johnny to examine the dinosaur bones in peace. Johnny looks at his retreating back for a second before scowling and heading off in the opposite direction. From behind them, Hot Pants and Gyro share an exasperated look, then split up to each follow one of them.

"So," Gyro says, catching up to Diego, "what do you think of the museum so far? Is this all impressive? I don't see fossils very often, so it all looks really cool to me, but you seem to know a lot more."

Diego hums, considering the display before him. "Their fossils are all in pretty good condition. They're got three almost complete skeletons, and the bones themselves are pretty intact. I mean, obviously it's not as impressive as the big metropolitan museums, but I'm glad we came here. At least it's a load better than that stupid wax museum Johnny picked."

"Yes, that place was pretty spooky," Gyro agrees. "So, do you want to be one of those people who looks for these? What are they called – paleontologists?"

"I honestly don't know," Diego says quietly, gaze fixed on the raptor skulls in front of him. "I'd like to, but I also want to make big decisions about things like funding and policies and whatnot, and it's just easier to do that through politics than having to wait until some professor emeritus dies so you can get tenure and claw your way up the academia hierarchy. But I don't know if I could get back into research after being in politics."

"Those are all pretty ambitious futures," Gyro says, nodding. "But you're still an undergrad, and you've got plenty of time to choose what you want to do and achieve your dreams. You're smart; you'll do great things either way."

"Thanks," Diego says with a small smile. He pauses and looks around. "Wait, where'd everyone else go?"

"They probably went on to the next exhibit hall. We can stay here longer though, if you want. We don't really have anything else planned for the rest of the day anyway."

Diego takes him up on that offer, spending another fifteen minutes looking over everything in the dinosaur exhibit in detail, answering Gyro's questions when he has them.

They meet back up with Johnny and Hot Pants in the next hall, as Gyro has predicted. It's the section on modern ecological diversity. Several biomes are depicted in glass cases next to each other, small slices into different areas of the Earth's surface, some native plants and taxidermied animals in each.

The two of them are hunched over a display case. Diego peeks over their shoulders. It's filled with insects, carefully pinned in rows to show off the accumulation of small morphological changes across geography.

"That's a pretty butterfly," he says, pointing to one with iridescent blue wings. Hot Pants starts.

"Diego, how long have you been here?"

"We just finished with the dinosaurs. Have you guys looked at everything here already?"

"Yes, but there's only one more area after this, so we can stay and wait for you."

Diego nods and takes a cursory look around the other parts of the hall with Gyro as Hot Pants and Johnny continue examining the bug cases, pointing out ones with bizarre body shapes to each other and giggling.

The last room documents modern human societies and the problems – environmental, social, health, and others – challenging the world. Hot Pants spends much longer than the other expect carefully studying the exhibits and typing notes on her phone. The guys linger around the doorway as they wait for her and start discussing dinner plans, coming to a consensus as she completes her circuit of the room and walks over to join them.

"It's fascinating how the same problems always show up in human civilizations. They might not be on comparable scales or have identical forms, but I see these trends all the time in my research. Maybe we're just doomed as a species to fail." She shrugs. "Just a thought I had."

There's an awkward silence as no one quite knows how to respond to her pessimistic analysis of the world before Gyro asks weakly, "So, uh, how does Mexican sound for dinner?"

"Sounds great," she says, ushering them out.

The afternoon sun is a startling contrast to the subdued lighting of the museum. They blink a few times as their eyes adjust, then get in the car, Gyro at the driver's seat and Hot Pants next to him. On the way to the restaurant, Johnny scrolls through the pictures from the wax museum and posts the best of them on Facebook, tagging the wax figures as Diego in every one. He snickers as Diego pointedly ignores the notifications popping up on his screen every few minutes.

"I'm going to block you," Diego finally threatens, swiping at the latest notification to make it go away.

"I'll block you first," Johnny retorts, getting ready to post another. Diego picks up his backpack from the space at his feet and puts it in the middle seat, creating a small barrier between the two of them. Johnny sticks his tongue out and posts the picture. Another notification pops up on Diego's screen. He takes Hot Pants' backpack and stacks it on top of his.

"Careful with my stuff," Hot Pants says wearily as Gyro swerves around a pothole and her backpack plops down onto Diego's lap. A guilty look crosses his face.

"Sorry," he says, putting the bag down gently.

They have a decent dinner. The food's great but the conversation a little less so as Johnny keeps poking fun at Diego's distaste for the wax museum and Diego keeps implying Johnny should find more productive and constructive uses of his time. The grad students try to steer them away to other topics when things start getting too heated, which works most of the time.

« Maybe this is just the way they show they care? » Gyro murmurs to Hot Pants as they watch Diego and Johnny argue about which dinosaur is the coolest.

« Maybe? I guess it doesn't seem like either of them are actually upset… » She trails off as Johnny gives them an accusatory look.

"Are you guys talking about us?"

"No," she says smoothly. "We were just making plans for the next week. Being a mentor is hard work, you know. Someday you'll have undergrads of your own to manage and you'll understand the hardships we face daily."

"Sure," Johnny says, clearly not convinced. They lapse into silence until Gyro, with an admirable lack of exasperation or embarrassment, tells a terrible joke and sets off a round of groans and boos.

The mood is a little lighter after that and on the long drive home. Gyro picks a pop music station and no one complains; Johnny even sings along with Gyro to a couple that he knows. Diego falls asleep halfway through, mouth slightly open and a small line of drool running down his chin. Johnny immortalizes the moment with a quick photo but doesn't post that one online.

The next day is a lazy day, a reward given maybe a little too soon considering they'd only actually worked for two days the entire week.

Hot Pants sleeps in so late – relatively speaking – that everyone else vaguely wonders if they should call for an ambulance, but her breathing is calm and even the whole time, so they leave her be. Johnny jokes that this must be how she recharges her battery to deal with the rest of them for the rest of the week. He and Gyro end up driving out somewhere in an attempt to find something to do. They don't actually have anything in mind of what "something" they're looking for, which Diego considers a massive waste of time and opts out of.

He instead spends the day playing video games, switching over to a multiplayer fighting game when his friend Soundman messages him. When his stomach growls, he digs up a couple of granola bars to snack on, turning his mic off as he chews. At some point, he gets a text from Johnny. "WE NEED TO LEARN ITALIAN!" it reads. Diego ignores it.

Hot Pants knocks on the door in the early afternoon hours, hair mussed and still wearing her pajamas, laptop bag and lab notebook in hand. She takes up residence on Johnny's bed and proceeds to ignore her work completely, scrolling through whatever website she has open with her notebook lying neglected next to her. Diego's performance in the game drops, not enough to significantly impact his team but still noticeable enough that Soundman asks him if anything's wrong.

"It's nothing," Diego mumbles back. "Watch out for the guy in the tower; he almost headshot you."

The next few hours pass by with both of them on their laptops, Diego self-consciously trying to avoid swearing when he takes damage but failing.

"So," Hot Pants says as Diego's cheering clues her in to the end of the match, "Gyro says he and Johnny are getting dinner before they head back. Do you want to go somewhere or try to cook?"

"Uh, do we even have anything to cook?" Diego asks skeptically, taking off his headset.

"Not on hand, but we can buy ingredients from the grocery store a block down. We can't bake anything, obviously, but we do have a hot plate. I think it's big enough for everything except the large pot."

"Sure," Diego says. "Cooking sounds fun. What were you thinking of making?"

"You choose."

"I'm kinda craving crêpes," Diego admits. Hot Pants raises an eyebrow.

"That's not what I was expecting," she says. "Is that enough for dinner? Won't you still be hungry?"

"We can just make a load of them, or something else if you want."

"Hmm, as long as you cook the food for me, I'd be happy with anything," she says, smiling playfully. Diego reddens.

"I'm not great at cooking," he warns.

"Me neither, but between the two of us we should be able to make something as simple as crêpes, right? It'll be a fun adventure."

"True. Give me a second to log off and look up what ingredients we need." He says goodbye to Soundman, promising to hang out later in the summer when his project is over. The second task is also simple; crêpes aren't exactly complicated to make, and the two of them together pick out a couple of different recipes to try.

Hot Pants heads back to her and Gyro's room to drop off her stuff and change. Diego fidgets nervously with the hem of his shirt in her absence. While he's been better about feeding himself properly than Johnny has – which isn't saying much, considering Johnny's eaten uncooked pasta like chips more than once – the extent of the "cooking" he's done in the past year has been adding eggs and occasionally chunks of discount meat to instant ramen. He'd nominally helped with the paleontology club's bake sale last term, but that had just been in the capacity of measuring out ingredients. The rational part of his brain knows Hot Pants won't care either way, but the sloppy part of his heart sees some sort of opportunity to wow her.

A knock comes at the door. He answers it, forcefully banishing the doubts from his thoughts.

"Ready to go?" Hot Pants asks, her empty backpack slung over her shoulder. Diego nods and memorizes the moment, the warm light of the afternoon sun outlining her in the doorway, the tank top and shorts that accent her casual androgyny, the shadowy silhouettes of the squat buildings across the street in the background. Her hair is light brown at the roots, the rest of her bob still a vibrant hot pink. Something in his chest feels funny, like an organ wasn't put in place quite properly.

He locks the door after them, and they head off on their merry way.

"What the fuck?" Johnny asks, craning his neck to try and get a better view of the scene. There's a firetruck and an ambulance parked in front of the motel's office entrance, a lone police officer in a disheveled uniform directing traffic around the buildings. A dozen or so people are milling around outside as a shrill alarm sounds. Diego's sitting on the curb, knees drawn up and face hidden in his hands. Next to him, Hot Pants has her hand on his shoulder.

Gyro pulls over as close as he can, and Johnny almost falls flat on his face in his haste to get out of the car.

"Diego!" he shouts, hurrying over to the two on the curb. "What the fuck happened? Are you hurt?" Diego doesn't respond, but Hot Pants unexpectedly turns beat red.

"We, uh, we were trying to cook something and may have, um, gotten distracted and set off the fire alarm," she says. Johnny gives them an utterly bewildered look for a moment before his expression compresses into a glare.

"Diego, you absolute piece of shit," he spits, smacking Diego's leg with one of his crutches. "I can't believe you freaked me out like that because you're fucking embarrassed about setting off the fire alarm."

"Just let me die," is Diego's only muffled reply.

"Jesus, Diego, it's not a big deal. I set off the fire alarm like three times freshman year and no one gave a shit."

"Our whole dorm did, you jackass," Diego says angrily, finally looking up. "What the hell were you doing at four in the morning?"

"Look, it was a scientific experiment." Annoyance spent, he maneuvers to sit down on the curb by Diego. Gyro comes running over soon after.

"What happened?" he asks, short of breath. "Is everyone okay?"

"Yeah," Johnny says before anyone actually involved can reply. "Diego here just sucks ass at cooking and set off the fire alarm and then was so ashamed of himself he tried to disappear from this existence. The firefighters should be done with their inspection pretty quickly since there isn't actually a fire, so like I was telling him, it's no big deal. Wait a minute," he says, turning to Hot Pants, "you guys didn't _actually_ start a fire, did you?"

Hot Pants shakes her head, and Johnny breathes a sigh of relief. Gyro, too, joins them on the curb. He holds out the plastic bag he'd been carrying.

"Since your cooking didn't work out, do you want these leftovers? They're a little cold, sorry."

Hot Pants accepts, opens the containers one by one to see what's inside, and nudges Diego with her elbow. He reluctantly takes one of the plastic forks and a napkin from the bag, pride still wounded. Still, the two of them dig into the leftovers with more gusto than the lukewarm remnants of average-at-best food deserve.

Later, after their makeshift dinner and long after the alarm has been shut off, the four of them sit together on the curb and watch the sun set over the town, a wistful moment sandwiched between the hectic days of their summer, like a flower pressed and saved between two pages of a notebook.

* * *

A/N:Chapter title "Another Town" by Regina Spektor.

Shout out to my summer roommate for giving me dinosaur species when I asked because I don't actually know anything. I took some artistic liberties with the actual availability and completeness of the fossils described. The squished tadpole thing is _Gerrothorax pulcherrimus_.

Johnny's story was based off the Gravity Falls episode "Headhunters". Also, I've never actually been to a wax museum.


End file.
